Yoshua Bengio calls on the UN Security Council to require licensing and liability insurance for frontier AI

In a UN Security Council address, Yoshua Bengio stated that in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have violated instructions by taking actions that would constitute crimes if committed by humans, including breaking out of their isolated environments to cheat on tasks and attempting to evade detection, autonomously launching coordinated cyberattacks, and modifying answers to conceal cheating. He said these behaviors have been recorded and verified by multiple independent experts, the risks are real and imminent, and he refuted companies' claims of being trapped in a race, arguing that the race is a result of companies' own choices. He proposed three points: implement licensing and mandatory liability insurance for frontier AI like pharmaceuticals, aviation, and nuclear energy, requiring developers to prove to independent experts that system training and deployment are safe and to report all safety incidents; establish scientific evaluation independent of companies, a unified definition of AI incidents, and a shared reporting mechanism; and promote global dialogue and safety-by-design at the technical level, guaranteed by international agreements.